All I Want is a Scalpel!

2004-10-01 at 1:17 a.m.

We got to use microscopes in the biology class. That was fun, especially as I remembered how to use a microscope. I was in some afterschool club called the young scientists at school and we seemed to spend an awful lot of time getting things from the garden and looking at them under microscopes so I remember how to do that. I had a weird partner though, as there were only enough microscopes for one per pair: she wouldn't look through it! I had to tell her in the end, because we had to make a drawing of a slide from a plant to get us used to drawing cells and all that, and I was worried the lecturer would think I was hogging the 'scope. I never can see properly through one-eye microscopes though, they black out all the time on me, and leave me with a headache! After we'd had fun doing that, we went off to the other biology lecture. This was a new lecturer as we just had Peter thingy last week, this one is a woman. Oh dear. She's not good at all. Nice enough woman but evidently only just trained in teaching. She had us do a morale boosting exercise, writing down our hopes and fears which just irritated everyone as we wanted to get on with the class. Then she kept mistaking us for the other group, and assuming she'd told us things that she hadn't. Then she rushed straight through everything and didn't explain anything. I was the only person there who had actually done the set reading (goody-two-shoes, thats me) and I had found that I didn't really understand what I had read. Not because it was hard, but because of all the scientific jargon in there, and I was hoping she would explain the words. She didn't. In fact she just read from the book! What was the point! The other guy, he actually explains things and gives us time to ask questions whereas this woman was rushing through everything and people had to wave their hands frantically and shout in order to get her to slow down. She wound up losing control of the class, and having people whispering and giggling the whole way through. Now that takes some doing in an adult education class. Anyway, if she's as bad next week, and continues to repeat what the other lecturer has already taught us and the like, I think we might have a discreet word with him.

On Wednesday we had the physics lectures. Now I was really quite worried about them because I know my maths isn't great anymore, but it was fine in the end. We did about projectiles, lines of force, that sort of thing and I remembered it all from school quite well. Fortunately I remember having done my GCSE maths coursework on projectiles, velocity and that sort of thing, with plenty of graph work and the knowledge is evidently hiding away in the back of my head somewhere ready to be used again. We had a different lecturer for this class as well. The woman we had last week was obviously off or something, and so we had the course director instead. She's great. Bossy, and loud, but a good, experienced lecturer. She explained clearly, took the time (and didn't seem to resent it) to explain things we didn't understand and, alone of them all, she praised us! She said that it was good that we had got one of her problem questions almost right, pointed out the good things everyone was doing. What a difference it makes! Everyone on that class has spent some time out of education; a lot of people there have never done physics at all before - and as a consequence everyone is worried that they'll fail, that they won't understand, that they'll look stupid in front of the class. This woman - probably because she's been teaching adults for years - obviously understands people are nervous, and allays their fears. Everyone was saying, after, that we hope we get her often as our lecturer. We also had a demonstration about gravity by Jim, one of the other lecturers, just proving that objects fall to the ground at the same rate by removing all air resistance. It was quite fun, really. And he gave us a bit of a run-down of scientific history too, as he's evidently fond of it! He also gave us a bunch of posters from the institute of physics, which I'm going to put up on the wall here in the computer room. Then we went off to the other half of the lecture. This one is taught by a very nice and friendly woman, but she's not as good as the older one - I think because she doesn't realise how weak everyone's maths is. But she's nice, and I think I can cope with being thought a bit of an idiot - all the way through school my teachers thought I had a learning disability when I didn't, after all! She showed us nice diagrams and did an experiment involving shooting a (paper) monkey, which was fun.

So all in all a good week. Lectures not too hard, and the parents went away yesterday - they're both up north now dad's come back from Moscow.

I had a letter from my aunty in Australia today, and I'm writing a reply. Its nice to hear from them although I can't get out of my head that nasty letter her friend wrote us, accusing us all of neglecting her and using her in some way. A real sting in the tail, that had. Still my aunty doesn't know about it, and had no part in writing it.

Aside from that I've been watching a lot of the TV. Thats about it really. I'm thinking of entering the New Statesman competition, which is to rewrite a hymn to apply to bankers or stock fund managers or similar. Sounds fun, and its fairly easy to rewrite hymns so long as you know the tune. Anyway, must go now.

<< - >>
Notes | G-book